A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Bit-Tech takes a peek at Sandy Bridge E Overclocking

Clive Webster published an interesting article last week that offers a glimpse in to how we are going to Overclock the next enthusiast processor family from the Intel. Codenamed Sandy Bridge E, Intel’s new enthusiast range is understandably starting to catch the attention of the Overclocking fraternity, who will be curious to read Clive’s initial analysis during the IDF show were Intel offered demonstration overclocks to media.

“All of Intel’s demonstration overclocks at IDF 2011 involved System Clock, CPU divider and CPU multiplier tinkering, but we saw enough to explain how to overclock a ‘locked’ Sandy Bridge E processor. Intel is still recommending that you don’t take the System Clock beyond 5 per cent of the nominal 100MHz, so to overclock a ‘locked’ Sandy Bridge E CPU you need to balance that 95-105MHz System Clock range with a gearing of 1.25x or 1.66x, and possibly by dropping the CPU multiplier.

There are a couple of other noteworthy features of Sandy Bridge E when it comes to overclocking. For example, the memory straps of a Sandy Bridge E system are still in 266MHz increments (Ivy Bridge will introduce finer control for the memory controller), and it still supports XMP for easy memory overclocking. We should also see the same voltage options in a Sandy Bridge E system as a Sandy Bridge system, as the voltage planes haven’t changed. This will mean two primary voltage options - one for the cores and one for the uncore area (the System Agent, memory controller, DMI controller, PCI-E controller and everything else that isn’t an execution core).”